Riga Latvia

Cobblestone streets are murder on the knees. Our tour of Latvia was mercifully short as it involved lots of walking through the old city on narrow cobblestone streets in the rain. Riga is a large city and quite beautiful. There are wonderful parks and old churches everywhere (for which they charge to enter) and lots of flowers blooming. The architecture is predominately art nouveau style and many of them have a large number of animals sculpted from stone on the facades. The city is surrounded by what used to be a moat and is now called a canal. There are several gates to the city still standing. This is another medieval city that has seen so much war, and destruction and reconstruction by various ethnic groups at one time or another. Again, here we see a lot of the Soviet influence as well as German. When the Soviets occupied Latvia (as well as the other Baltic countries we have visited), they destroyed much of the cultural and religious icons and buildings of the cities. Churches that were built in the 1200s, for example, have since been reconstru cted or repaired. Of course, once the Soviets left most of their icons were destroyed as well. Today, 45% of Latvia is Russian speaking.

Being an escort sure has been interesting on this trip. The passengers are mostly older folks, and they like to be taken care of. And they sure do complain a lot – about everything, especially the weather. This is our third straight day of rain, and I assured them I can work miracles but not with the weather. That is beyond the scope of my job description. Again, the guides in this part of the world seem to lack the polish and sophistication of those in Berlin, although I don’t think anyone could beat the Germans in this department. After we got off the bus, someone wanted to know where the bathrooms were. I asked the guide and she indicated that public toilets would be at the next plaza but would cost 20 Latvia cents. Well, no one had any Latvia money and didn’t want to buy anything just to get change. You cannot use the bathrooms in restaurants either unless you buy something. It would have been nice to have noted this in the cruise information the passenger received at booking and if the guide had mentioned it before we left the bus (which has a toilet). Jeeesh, the things I have to do to keep the troops happy. At the plaza, some folks caved and used the toilets there. While they were occupied with that task, the guide starts walking off with half the group and the rest were standing there not knowing what to do. So I have to yell at everyone to stop and let me count the group to see how many were missing. All in a day’s work. See, nothing is totally free!!

Being on a small ship is very intimate. There are 700 passengers and everywhere you turn, there is someone you know from either bridge, dinner or a tour. Most people are very friendly. I had an interesting encounter in the laundry room yesterday. I was waiting for the washing machines to finish and since no one came to claim their clothes, I placed the just washed clothes into laundry baskets and put my stuff in. Eventually, a lady came in and was wondering if her clothes were dry yet. Now how the heck do I know? She looks in the dryer and takes the clothes out. Then she looks at the wet stuff in the laundry basket and asked me if they were her clothes! This is for real. I told her I didn’t know. She looks through the stuff and says she thinks it looks like her stuff and proceeds to tell me she had no knowledge of how it came to be in the washer. Honestly! Then she asked me if I dried it. No, it’s wet! You gotta wonder about some people.

The cruise director came up to Michael and told him that he received many complements on the bridge games and lessons. We are having social bridge today so are expecting a larger turnout. Seems a lot of bridge players on this ship are intimidated by duplicate bridge.

Tomorrow were are in Estonia.